Disappearing Dishes

LETTER FROM MEXICO about Mexican cookbook author Diana Kennedy... Kennedy, is a cook, writer, and foremost authority on Mexican food... Writer tells about a demonstration of a recipe in Kennedy’s impressive kitchen... Kennedy is known for her tetchiness as much as for her wit... Diana Southwood first arrived in Mexico in 1957. She came from England to join Paul Kennedy, a correspondent for the New York Times, whom she had met on a steamship. They were married the following year. She had not been brought up in a household consecrated to the kitchen arts-her mother was a kindergarten teacher, her father a salesman-but the gods gave her what she terms "a love of good food and an abounding curiosity and restlessness." Paul Kennedy’s Times colleague Craig Claiborne came to Mexico in the mid-sixties and feasted at Kennedy’s table several times. At the end of one meal, when she tried to press a Mexican cookbook into his hands, he said, "I will read a Mexican cookbook the day you write one." Years later, Diana Kennedy, by then widowed, decided to accept Claiborne’s words for what they were: practical advice. Kennedy sought out cooks, interviewed them, and noted down the tiniest details of recipes so instinctive her informants didn’t even know they were supposed to have names... now that her work is at last being translated into Spanish, Mexicans, too, will be able to understand why the tamales from Michoacán called corundas should be wrapped in a long corn leaf folded to resemble a five-pointed star, according to pre-Hispanic tradition. Kennedy estimates that dozens of types of chilies, along with beans and tomatoes of every size, flavor, and color, and an infinite variety of fish, crustaceans, edible weeds, cactuses, and desert and jungle fruits are vanishing. Mexicans once picked and cooked them imaginatively, but they are falling prey to agribusiness, land erosion, drought, rural migration, and warehouse food emporiums. The crops are vanishing, and so, largely, is the cuisine. The last holdouts of authentic Mexican cooking, campesinos who grow local produce and the artisans and marchantes, or salesmen and women of the open-air markets, live in a state of cultural siege. Mentions a meal she served to Prince Charles...